Food Homesickness

I will freely admit to having a love/hate relationship with my hometown of Erie.

Love: The lake and beaches.
Hate: The 7-9 months of shitty weather.
Love: The older urban architecture.
Hate: The careless urban dilapidation.
Love: The small town feel.
Hate: The pervasive small town mindset.
Love: The friends and family I grew up with.

The list could go on and on.

Lately, however, the "hates" have receded to the back of my mind and intense cravings for Erie food has been at the forefront of my brain. For some, Erie may not have a lot to offer, but it does have a very distinct and delicious food culture. Here in Nashville there is, of course, an abundance of Southern food but I haven't really found much in the way of a particular Nashville food culture. There's the Hot Chicken which I've been told is distinctly Nashville, but that's about it.

Erie on the other hand...

Well here's a comment I found about Erie on a thread over at ChowHound:

"For being a little hellhole in Pennsylvania, they sure do have their own little food culture, and I love it!"

Right on man!

Today, Daniel and I went to the Greek Festival for lunch and my mouth was watering anticipating the Greek Fries I grew up eating at the Greek Festival in Erie. Imagine my profound dismay when I was served a cup of french fries sprinkled with a few Greek herbs. WTH!?

Okay okay, I realize that the Greek Fries I was served this afternoon were probably more authentically Greek, but when I think "greek" fries I can only conjure up a plate of greasy fries piled high with the spicy "greek" sauce and melted cheddar cheese. Oh mama! Erie-ites, back me up here!

I could even eat a greek hot dog right now (which is unusual for me because I generally hate hot dogs and can't even remember the last time I ate one).

But let's not stop there.

How about Pepperoni Balls? ohmigod. Little fried tennis ball of dough filled with spicy pepperoni. I have never seen nor eaten these things outside of Erie. Speaking of Italian food...Erie has some of the best Italian food joints. I seriously have not been able to locate an Eggplant Parmesan Sub anywhere near equal to the one served by Valerio's. Makes my wouth water just thinking about it.

And for dessert there are at least two options. Morning dessert = Mighty Fine Donuts. Especially the chocolate cream filled donuts. I try and try to like the chocolate cream filled donuts that can be found around here, but they pale in comparison. Evening dessert = Sponge Candy from Romolo's (or any candy really). This is the food of the gods and I could eat a whole bag of it right this second.

Not sure where these cravings for my hometown foods are coming from exactly - nostalgia? pregnancy hormones? Or maybe I'm just hungry!

I'm going to go see if I can find a recipe for Daniel to make some authentic tasting Erie Greek Sauce!

What are some other distinctly Erie foods?

Hello Grind, It's Me Again

Here I am. Back at it.

The project that was supposed to go out the week I was on Vacation, got delayed, so immediately upon my return, I was plunged into the Deadline Zone working long hours to get the drawings out the door. After having a week of long leisurely days doing a whole lotta nothing, this was a cruel shock to my system.

Vacations are like anesthesia, they should wear off gradually, gently easing a person back into life’s routines. Being thrown abruptly back into stress and chaos effectively erases the week’s worth of serenity you carefully cultivated.

Sitting at my computer at 8:30 pm, working on dreaded elevator details and OR layouts, the memories of this begin to fade.



As I drive home on the dark deserted streets the calmness of Vacation ebbs to be replaced with anxious stomach acid and I have to try to remember this.



Eating dinner at my desk, again, while making sure dimensions are accurate, it’s difficult to recapture the sweetness of this.



Instead of schedules, sketches, lists, and contacts pinned up inside my cubicle walls, I think I should plaster it with these images of Vacation instead.












Vacation was lovely. We had ideal summer weather, which is highly unusual for Erie at any time of the year – even in summer. The beach house we rented came with its very own adorable private beach. The lake was cool and calm for most of our visit and it was such a soul satisfying treat to spend the day bobbing amongst the waves and tiny silver fish.

It was glorious waking up to the sound of waves instead of the sound of an alarm clock. Reading a good book on a beach chair, in the warm sun, with the waves lapping over your feet is truly one of life’s ultimate pleasures. One night we went to a late movie, afterwards returning to thick summer darkness and the ever-present sounds of the water. One evening we ate grilled fish, outside on the dock while the sun set slowly. One afternoon we nosily poked around a dusty, sweet-smelling used book store. We ate fresh corn, and beans, and tomatoes and zucchini from my grandparent’s garden.

We were able to enjoy our friends and family without the burden of time constraints or holiday obligations.

By the end of the week, I was ready to head home, to my own bed, to my fuzz-butts, to my neighborhood and my unfinished house. And I’m happy to be back. I just miss the joyful simplicity of Vacation. The peace that comes from an unhurried pace.

Time for Vacay*

Tomorrow morning at 5:00 (yes, 5 A.-fucking-M.), Danielson and I will be driving the 10 hours to my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania. Woo hoo!

I am very excited about this for a couple of reasons:

1. I REALLY need time away from my job right now. I've been feeling pretty burnt-out/despondent the past month. I'm tired of deadlines. I'm tired of OR layouts, and ED headwalls. I'm tired of Revit. I'm tired of my office. I just need a break, OKAY!? *deep breath* In through the nose...out through the mouth...

2. We will have an entire week in Erie. This is unprecedented. Typically if I venture to Erie, it is not only during a major holiday, but it is also only for a few days in which I am staying with friends or family, and basically running non-stop in an effort to see everyone. It's always fairly exhausting.

Not this time, my friend. This time, we will be renting a beach house all to ourselves. Sweet. AND we're going at a time when there is nothing else going on. No Christmas. No Fourth of July. No long Labor Day weekend. We will actually be able to spend leisurely days together and then enjoy our friends and families in the evenings. We don't have to make excessive plans in order to fit everyone in...we can just play it by ear. Which is exactly how I like to play it.


Even though it's a long drive, I'm looking forward to it. I like road trips. And, we just bought a new car, so it'll be interesting to see what kind of gas mileage we get. We traded in my old V8 Oldsmobile for a new Nissan Versa (meep meep!). And no, we did not qualify for the Cash for Clunkers program. It was just the right thing to do and the right time (for us) to do it. We'd been talking about getting a fuel-efficient vehicle for a while now and when we test drove the Versa, we just really liked it.

I can play with the satellite radio the whole way there - bonus! Plus, we're breaking up the drive a bit with a brief layover in Columbus Ohio to have lunch with Daniel's brother and nieces (commonly referred to as "Jimnthegirls").

Erie - Here We Come!

* that's for you, honey! ;) (psst! Danielson gets annoyed with "words" like "vacay"...and sometimes it's just too damn hard to resist annoying him by using "words" like "vacay")

The 4th

My trip to Erie last week for the fourth of July was alarmingly similar to my Whirlwind Christmas Trip to Erie last year.

Drive 6 hours from Nashville to Columbus
Drive 4 hours from Columbus to Erie
Drive to grandparents for dinner
Drive to karaoke bar to meet friends for drinks
Drive to uncle's for 4th of July party
Drive to stepmother's for 4th of July party
Drive to mother's for 4th of July party
Drive to friend's for 4th of July party
Drive to beach
Relax on beach, wriggle toes in sand
Drive to amusement park
Ride on rollercoaster with friend
Drive to cousin's graduation party
Drive to bar to meet friends
Drive to restaurant for breakfast with grandparents
Drive 10 hours from Erie to Nashville
Collapse

Except this time, Daniel came with me. I have to say, it's rather satisfying to have someone share in the utter exhaustion of my hometown visits, even if I felt pangs of guilt at dragging him all over town with a sprained ankle. (He fell off of our driveway. Don't ask.)

Okay, so even though it's a seriously draining endeavor to "vacation" in Erie where almost all of my family, my two best friends, and their families reside, it IS nice to see people. But, not unlike my Christmas visits, there are so many people to see and so many places to be, that "quality time" ceases to exist. Instead it becomes a mad dash to see how many engagements I can cram onto my plate so as not to disappoint anyone. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

I think a good solution to this situation is to encourage various friends and family members to move to other places. That way, when I go somewhere to visit, there won't be SO many people to see all in one place. AND, I'll have lots of different places to visit. See how that works? Heh.

So, listen up friends and family members of Erie: I need some of you to move. May I suggest Honolulu? Or perhaps Boston? Maybe a few of you could move up to Maine - I hear it's pretty and you would still have plenty of snow to enjoy. What about Denver or Colorado Springs? Or hey, how about Chicago - you'd still have lake and cold weather. Eh? Eh?

I'm just sayin'.

A Response to Erie

My rigorous blogging schedule has slid into lackadaisical picture posting. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. No, in fact I’ve been writing a lot. I started a post about my religion class from a week ago but somehow haven’t found the time to finish it amongst the other writing I’ve been doing. I’ve been writing project profiles at work. I’ve been writing random short stories. And I’ve been writing responses to annoying newspaper editorials.

While I won’t bore you by posting my work-related writings and there’s no way in hell I’m posting my short stories, below you’ll find my editorial response to Pat Howard of the Erie Times. See, I get this weekly Erie Times newsletter called Inside Erie, which I guess is like a condensed version of the local newspaper. I think Jennifer made me sign up for it a long time ago to access a picture of Owen that was printed in the newspaper and ever since then I’ve been the recipient of these weekly Erie emails.

Most often I just delete them. Sometimes I’ll glance through it quickly, scanning for familiar names. And sometimes when something catches my eye, I’ll actually read the thing. Yesterday, when it popped up in my inbox, for some reason I actually read the thing. And here’s what I read:

Thursday, February 14, 2008
Let Erie be Erie by Pat Howard

At a reception long ago for a marriage that’s long gone, a few of the groom’s buddies wanted to make the point that they expected him to remember where he came from once he joined the upscale family he was marrying into.

The boys sent that message via a special delivery to the swanky party at the Erie Club — Greek dogs from Red Hot restaurant at East 12th and Parade. Point made.

That moment came back to me as people started talking about Erie making a good impression when some of the business world’s A-listers come to town in April for the annual General Electric Co. shareholders’ meeting at the Bayfront Convention Center.
Sure, the usual lessons your parents taught you about special occasions apply. Wear clean clothes, remember your manners and make a good first impression.
But mostly, be yourself.

GE Transportation has been generating some press for Erie recently in big-time media.
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman — he of “The World Is Flat” fame — not long ago held up the Lawrence Park locomotive plant as one of the success stories of globalism. A reporter from the Financial Times noted that the factory has become a star performer in GE’s cutthroat corporate culture.

But the latter report poked at a sore spot. The Financial Times guy felt the need to set the factory in “the unfashionable town of Erie.”

You see that sort of thing every once in a while in the drive-by reporting of journalists rushing through on their way to someplace else. It’s what they do. They only get a few minutes and a few words to capture us.

The most common form has been the summing up of our community from the seat of a cab or rental car headed east from Erie International Airport along West 12th Street. Look at the empty factories. Cue the tired Rust Belt/seen better times/hardscrabble references.

But unfashionable? Well, the gentleman has a point as far as it goes.

Bright lights, big city we’re not. Trust me, the business glitterati and the press that follows them aren’t going to confuse our town with Wall Street or the Hamptons.
And that’s OK. Embrace it. Be proud of it. Strut it down the runway and work it.
We are who we are, and we come from where we come from. We live on a lake with all the water any industry could drink. We enjoy a quality of life that many entrants in the global rat race would envy.

We work hard. We play hard. We’re quirky. We’re fun. If our town were a character in a movie, it would be played with soul, depth and a touch of weirdness by Johnny Depp.
Think of the mail that comes to Inside Erie from natives now living in Atlanta or Orlando or Los Angeles. A good many point out that Erie doesn’t have a lot of what they have in their megalopolises. But that’s not what they miss.

By all means, each of us should put our best foot forward. Let’s hope our guests will understand if some of them are sporting Chuck Taylors.

Okay, for those of you who have never lived in Erie, or visited Erie, or know anything at all about Erie (which is the majority of you), this little newspaper column probably didn’t have the same effect on you as it did on me. It grated on my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. It seemed to represent everything that annoys me about my hometown, and before I could help myself I was furiously typing out a scathing response to Pat Howard’s smug and vaguely self-congratulatory editorial. Here’s what I sent him:

Erie is a frustrating place. Yes, it's unfashionable, but unfortunately not in a quirky way. Erie is unfashionable in a depressingly trite way. More of a Tom Arnold character than a Johnny Depp. But for some reason, the people of Erie seem grossly ignorant of their unfashionability, i.e. "strut it down the runway and work it". That would be sound advice if there was in fact something to strut. They speak highly of the fine dining and plentiful shopping and cultural opportunities, when in reality, Erie is largely full of mediocre chain restaurants, suburban stores found in every middle-class town in America, and cultural events that include fried cheese on a stick. There is nothing fashionable or quirky about Erie. It can't even call itself quaint.

Though born and raised in Erie, I moved away for college and grad school, and in a fit of misplaced nostalgia, I moved back only to move away again in defeat and disgust three years later.

The only thing I miss about Erie is the Lake. Erie does have some of the most stunning natural environments I've ever experienced. But man cannot live on nature alone. Career opportunities are nearly non-existent for those coming out of higher education programs with advanced degrees. Things like independent thought, global awareness, imaginative alternatives, progressive solutions, and diverse cultures are what help make small communities fashionable and quirky. Erie does not seem to value any of those things.

Perhaps at one time, Erie could have moved in the "quirky, unique, quaint" direction and maybe could have even flourished by embracing a Johnny Depp personality - becoming something uncommon, fascinating, and a little bit weird. Instead, Erie moved like a small-minded lemming and followed in the footsteps of so many other mundane, unimaginative communities with irrationally high opinions of themselves. I'm afraid Erie will continue to be a place of stunning natural beauty, but little else.

I'm not usually one to take the time or effort to make a fuss over something I can't change, but I felt compelled to voice my opinion on the perceived vs. real image of my depressed little hometown. We’ll see if my response is included in next week’s installment of Inside Erie.